Patrick Flores & Jun Yang in Conversation with Miya Yoshida

Across the Global South, islands form an interconnected and ever-changing relation of peoples and cultures. To revisit the main theme of the Island Tides Program, we take from Glissant’s archipelagic thinking and explore how art and culture move, mix, and evolve across islands in the Asia-Pacific.

Patrick Flores, Professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines & Chief Curator of the National Gallery Singapore, and Jun Yang, visual artist & board member of the Wiener Secession, will share insights from their practices and experiences within this transgressive archipelagic space we call Asia.

PATRICK FLORES is Chief Curator of National Gallery Singapore. He is concurrently Professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines and Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network.

He has written significantly on Southeast Asian art, specifically its colonial and modernist formations, and has curated contemporary exhibitions on and through Southeast Asia. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014.

Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008); Raymundo Albano: Texts (2017); and The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader (2023), which he co-edited with T. K. Sabapathy. He was a Curator (Position Papers) at the Gwangju Biennale in 2008, the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale in 2019 and Curator of the Philippine Pavilion in 2015 and the Taiwan exhibition in 2022 at the Venice Biennale.

JUN YANG  is an artist based in Vienna, Taipei and Yokohama. His works encompass various mediums – including, film, installation, performance and projects in the public spaces while addressing institutions, societies and audiences. Having grown up and lived in various different cultural contexts, in his artistic work Jun Yang examines the influence of clichés and media images on identity politics.

Previous exhibitions include the Biennial of Sydney 2018, the Gwangju Biennale 2018 and 2012; the Taipei Biennial 2008, the Liverpool Biennial 2006, the 51st Biennale di Venezia 2005, and the Manifesta 4 in 2002. He is the recipient of the 25th Otto Mauer Art Award in 2005 and the Award for Fine Arts of the City of Vienna in 2017.

Jun Yang concluded working on a series of solo-exhibitions/retrospectives that started at the Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2018) continued at Kunsthaus Graz (2019) and was shown in Taipei at Kuandu Museum 2020, TKG+ Projects 2020/2021 and MoCA Taipei 2021 (as one exhibition at three venues in one city). Yang decided thereafter to take ‘off’ from making exhibitions. With his interest in institutions Yang joined the board of the Vienna Secession in 2021.

MIYA YOSHIDA is a professor of artistic research and head of the Zentrum Fokus Forschung. Yoshida previously taught aesthetics, media and cultural theories and art history and studied media and governance at Keio University, SFC, in Japan and completed an MA in art history at Goldsmiths College, University of London in the UK. After completing her master's degree, she continued her doctoral studies and received her PhD from Malmö Art Academy, Lund University and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), lectures at international conferences and publishes critical texts on contemporary art and aesthetics. Her recent writings and publications can be found in Reformulating the architectures in exhibitions (Exhibition Amnesia, Curatography Issue.10, Taipei National University of the Arts, 2023), Listening to the Stones (Kunsthaus Dresden, 2023), Towards (Im)Measurability of Art and Life (Archive Books, Berlin 2018), Sharing as Caring No. 1-5 (Heidelberger Kunstverein, 2017), among others. She is currently one of the co-curators for the Asian Triennial Manchester 6.